How to free up space on Android or iPhone?

Our smart phones are now becoming our best friends and many of us cannot tolerate even a minute away from them. We all have a number of apps on our phones, we take photos and record videos using our mobile devices. But the point here is that all these apps and multimedia files take up space on our phones. In fact, the thing that bugs about most smart phones is not no matter how large your storage space is, you will finally reach a point at which the “low storage space” drives you crazy. If you have already reached that point, this article is exactly what you need. Read along to find out how to free up space on Android and iPhone.

Free up space on Android

Our Android phones used to come with 4 GB of storage space and now with the minimum of 64 GB, we wonder how we could fit all our stuff in those phones. However, it seems that we can never get enough and we are always dealing with low storage space problem.

Undoubtedly, the best way to free up space on your Android phone is to perform a factory reset. A factory reset allows you to start everything from the very first step, but this of course may also end up in losing your precious files. And of course, it is too time taking to set up everything on your phone once more.

If you don’t want to reset your Android phone to factory settings but you need to free up your phone storage, here are a few things you can do.

Move your files to Google Drive

If you have a lot of old photos and videos that you can’t afford to delete, yet they are occupying too much space, the best you can is to move your files to a cloud service and what’s better than Google Drive for your Google-owned Android phone?

Definitely, your photos and videos are the major hog for your storage space especially if your phone has a high quality camera that generates large file size. Moving all those old and precious photos and videos to a cloud storage will not only free up space on your phone, but it will also keep those files in a safer place.

Clear cache files for your apps

The cache files allow you to have a better user experience. These files allow you to have all the files ready in front of your the moment you launch an app. But the point here is that these apps are merely for convenience and their existence on your phone is not a must. This is while these cache files can get really big over time. For example, Telegram cache files can reach 4 or 5 GB after a month of using the app.

To clear cache files for a single app, go to Settings > Applications > Application Manager and tap on the app you want to modify. In the Application info menu, tap Storage and then tap Clear Cache to clear the app’s cache.

Delete your downloads

Of course it is great to have all your downloaded files ready to be able to use them whenever you want, but the fact here is that these downloaded files all take up space on your mobile phone.

The chances that you totally forget about your downloads is very high. So they are like those hidden files which are secretly eating up your space.

If you have a download manager on your phone, accessing and deleting your downloads folder is definitely easy. If you don’t have a File Manager, you can easily download one from Google Play and then attempt to delete your downloads.

Shoot lower resolution photos and videos

Most of the modern and new smart phones are now capable of shooting 4K videos and high quality photos with great details. High-resolution videos are great to look at, however, the size of the generated file is very large. If you don’t need HD videos and you are short on storage space, you can change your resolution and set to take videos with lower quality. This way, your files will occupy less space on your phone.

Free up space on iPhone

Regardless of your operating system, limited storage space can cause many problems for you. How much do you hate the “iPhone storage almost full” message? Yes, I know how annoying that is.

Many of the methods to free up space on Android can be applied to iPhone as well. For example, you can use your iCloud service to upload your photos and videos. While iCloud is available for you for free, it doesn’t stop you from using Google Drive as well.

In addition, the same story about cache files goes on iPhone as well. You can go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage to see the space that each app is taking. However, to clear the cache files you will need to delete the app and reinstall it.

Here are some other tips you can follow to free up space on your iPhone.

Offload unused apps

In iOS 11 and newer there is an extremely handy feature which allows you to offload the apps that you do not want to use for now. If you enable this option, the app will not be removed. The icon will still appear in the list of your apps and will just notice a cloud icon next to it. However, if you decide to use that particular app again, you will need to redownload it. Any process or achievement on that app will be saved.

Go to Settings > General > iPhone Storage and then click “Enable” next to the Offload Unused Apps option.

Set messages to be deleted automatically

When compared to photos and apps, messages might not be large in size, however, they still take up space on your iPhone. One of the great things about your iPhone is the built-in feature that allows your messages to self-delete. By default, your messages will never be deleted, however, you can set a time limit beyond which your messages are automatically deleted.

To enable this feature, what you need to do is to go to Settings > Messages and down under “Message History” tap on “Keep Messages” and set the time you want.

Empty your “Recently Deleted” folder

When you delete a photo or video on your iPhone, that particular file will be moved to the Recently Deleted folder. This folder allows you to recover any file that you have deleted by mistake. However, the files that are kept on that folder still take up space on your phone and you have not noticed that.

What you need to do is to open your Photos app and navigate to the Albums tab. Now scroll down the list and tap the Recently Deleted option. you can now see the photos or videos you have deleted. you can choose to recover them or delete them for good. To delete the files, tap Select from the top right corner and then choose Delete All from the bottom left corner. You can also tap photos to choose the ones that you’d want to delete.